However, because the sixteen year old he murdered without evidence, arrest, trial, judge, jury or verdict on his unilateral will alone was related to some other guy he also ordered dead, and they both have foreign-sounding names, it’s all fine.
When the President does it, it’s not illegal. And when the President decides that acts of crime–or suspected crime–committed by, oh, the sort of people currently causing such headaches for the IRS with their prayers and Planned Parenthood protests and uppity ways are likewise “terror” there is nothing but custom and the rapidly eroding sense that “the President just wouldn’t go there” to keep him from going there.
If the economy *really* implodes, our Ruling Class would not hestitate for a second to turn on its own citizenry domestically the powers it is already turning on citizens abroad.
“But these people are Bad Guys”. Well yes. So the Administration tells us. So were Jeffrey Dahmer and Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy and Timothy McVeigh and Sirhan Sirhan and John Hinckley, Jr (who tried to kill the Commander-in-Chief and today would certainly be called a “terrorist”). To paraphrase Uncle Billy, “Not every heel is in Pakistan and Yemen.” But if “He’s a bad guy according to the people who killed him” is now sufficient for the President to get away with ordering their death–even the death of a sixteen year old boy “not specifically targeted by the United States” then nothing but custom and the fading notion that the State can’t do that to us stands in the way of the state doing it to us.
Yet ironically, the very people being targeted by the IRS are often the same people who spent a decade cheering most loudly for the state’s claim that if we will give it the power to indefinitely detain, torture and murder people in the name of “security”, it will keep us safe.